Tafreshi established the program The World at Night (TWAN), which co-founded this annual photo contest in 2008. The goal of the contest is to raise awareness about light pollution, which drowns our view of planets, stars, and galaxies in the night sky — a sight that is growing more rare each year as cities swell bigger and brighter.

"Perhaps from this perspective we can better preserve the natural night sky and reconnect it with our modern life," Tafreshi said about the contest.

Here are the 10 award-winning photos for this year, selected from an initial pool of over 1,000. You can learn more about the contest on the TWAN website.

The moon, located right of center, lights this snow-covered forest in Murmansk, Russia. Above, a bright-green aurora borealis adorns the night sky.

Here, a giant aurora stretches across the night sky connecting the Icelandic cities of Keflavik on the left with Reykjavik on the right.

When a lunar eclipse rose over the Yangtze River in Chongqing, China, the photographer snapped a series of photos of the event and combined them in this composite image that shows the moon's movement as an ascending, solitary streak amidst the busy city lights.